There's no reason it should catch Louis off-guard, hearing Louisiana in Lestat's voice in even minor measures, but it does.
Complicated, how he feels about it. How much he likes it. How the sound of it carries a muted pain along with it. New Orleans making its mark on Lestat, and Louis miles and miles away, losing his own accent for long decades. A sorrowful kind of symmetry.
"I know you have money," Louis tells him, setting aside his empty cup. Admits, quiet: "Lived off it for a couple months when we first got to Paris."
And he'd felt deep guilt about it, how they'd taken from him after what they'd done. What Louis had done. Claudia's anger simmering, remorseless, and Louis haunted, grief-stricken and guilty, using Lestat's money for that apartment, for clothes, for furnishings—
It had felt wrong.
But this, it's not only about the money they'd taken, not about repayment. Louis still likes to pick out things for Lestat. A phone is only the most acceptable avenue, utilitarian rather than the opulent whirl of goods they'd swept up when Lestat had first arrived in New Orleans.
The handful of months spent in Paris had consisted of at least one appointment with Roget. The theatre destroyed meant a shuffle around in various portfolios. Reports of what had been extracted, including his final letter. Money, then, shifted into a kind of interest-accruing hibernation. The practical things, done at his behest.
But Lestat does not recall feeling resentment or anger or really much of anything at the time and now, certainly not. He starts to say something like what he used to say, to express that all his wealth is Louis' wealth, and stops. If this is true, what does that say for the reverse?
Maybe what Lestat is saying: I can look after myself.
Suspects he will have to, at some point, but for now—
"Then, if it would please you."
His tone says: if it would please Louis, it would please him too.
Maybe will have to say later, once a phone is procured, that it would please him also if Lestat were to use it.
But not now.
The far door opens once more. Rachida bears in a crisp brown paper bag, sets it by the window. A brief exchange between her and Louis, logistics only. A few lingering pieces of business, things that could not accommodate being upended just because Louis' life had been entirely upended.
And then she is gone. And it is the two of them, alone in a room again.
"I made guesses," Louis says. "What you might like to wear."
And may well be far off base. They have been apart for a long time. Lestat had been wearing expensive things, in spite of the obvious neglect. Louis has chosen some similar items. Draping shirts, gleaming black buttons for fastening. Soft, clinging undershirts. Loose trousers, waists nipped in. And Lestat's own boots returned, polished, repaired.
The human comes in, which feels odd. Far removed from the days of invisible servants, who could go anywhere and see anything and it didn't matter. They'd guarded their own privacy in New Orleans. A maid on occasion and nothing more intimate than that. Still, Lestat doesn't hackle, just curls his knees in slightly, watches the proceedings.
Like Louis has let in a stray cat, which happens to be a lion. He finishes his cup while they talk, a languid and luxurious drinking down of thick blood, twisting to set it down once she leaves the room.
"Oh?" at this news. Tempting enough to draw Lestat out of bed, finally, one last glance before pushing himself across the mattress to go attend to the bag. Not because he is so excited for new clothes, but keen to see what Louis would choose for him.
Hums over these items, drawing them out one by one. Garments made for men but with the textures and softness that he would still associate with women's clothes, trousers that hang like skirts and shirts that drape like blouses. Pleasing, this confusion, or mingling, whatever it is. These resemble, too, the things he'd been wearing last night, even if he barely recalls obtaining them, choosing them.
Louis had guided him into the present day, but Lestat had found his footing eventually.
(A fond memory of the ways their wardrobes had complimented. Subtle matching between colors, small mirrors in their chosen accessories. Louis had enjoyed those things, minor ways to link them, if easy to overlook.)
"This is just for starters," Louis reminds, the curling pleasure in his chest rising as he watches Lestat handling his choices kept in careful check. "You can send Rachida out if you want. If there's more you think you need."
While he's here. While they're together. A offer guided by the anxious urge to get Lestat set up, well-stocked and safe, guiding the offer.
Strange to imagine that a man's wardrobe can fit inside a paper bag, but, this seems to be achievable. Especially as he is not completely certain of the state of his things as they are now. Not just for the hurricane, but, the previous decades, years, months. At the bottom of the bag, he finds someplain but undoubtedly luxurious sets of underwear and socks, so he doesn't have to immediately add these little necessities to the list.
"These will do, Louis," Lestat says instead, looking over at him. Clutching the articles in his hands tighter, relaxing, before he says, with a tip of his head, "Should I change in the other room?"
A little bit of a real question, but delivered with some coy and proper affectation.
It's a real question, one Louis should think on with some seriousness. They've already been naked with each other, laid completely bare in the hours since they'd reunited and Louis had brought him here. But maybe there should be a point where some boundaries are reintroduced.
Maybe.
"You change where you want," Louis tells him, an easy shrug of acceptance as he leaves Lestat in custody of the bag and considers his own suitcase. "I won't mind."
A choice laid out for Lestat as Louis strips to the waist. His suitcase is neatly opened on its stand, waiting for Louis to make some selections of his own.
But turns his back, and undresses without ceremony. Then, briefs first, followed by a pair of trousers of a dark grey with a subtle pinstripe, fabric draping save for where it buttons around his waist. A clinging wide-necked undershirt is layered beneath a loose button down of a deep rusty red. Some hesitation follows buttoning it closed halfway up his chest and tucking the loose tails into his waistband. And then undoing another button.
Familiar shades, somewhat familiar silhouettes, flattering his proportions in the way he'd been specific about back when, and still now. He skims his fingers over his knuckles. His little collection of rings, likely still hidden away in his home. Unless Felix stole them. In which case, he will remove Felix's spine.
"Voilà," he says, twirling back around. If he catches sight of a butt cheek by accident, it will be a good start to the evening, but he has been polite. "What should I do with the sleeves?" Rolled, unrolled and buttoned? He would like input.
The twirl yields a glimpse of bare back, the flex of muscle as Louis' arms lift to guide down a polo, lightweight and textured. Regrettably, Louis had pulled on his trousers first. Utilitarian today, maybe in anticipation of excavating Lestat's cottage, worn canvas fabric artfully distressed.
It is a marked deviation. Louis is experimenting, not yet sure he is interested but willing to give himself the day.
"Come here," Louis beckons, reaching out with one hand while the other tugs clinging knit fabric into place over his chest and stomach.
An excuse to take Lestat by the wrist, run his thumb over the delicate tracery of veins there at the inside of his arm before fastening the button.
Lestat gives up his wrists easily, holding himself still under the passing sweep of Louis' thumb, the gentle tickle of fabric drawn tighter to button. Sense memories of similar gestures in the past. Undoing shirt buttons. Applying gifted cufflinks.
Home, in little golden glimpses. How near it seems, how far away. He wanders a glance back up at this question.
"Yes," he says, unsure as to what metric they're measuring by, but all of them are at the very least okay. The clothes, probably. A glance aside locates a mirror on the wall, and he turns to it while leaving his other wrist in Louis' care. "Your valet has good taste."
He has not had much cause to preen in front of a mirror, lately. The only one in his cottage is in the door of its wardrobe, which is spotted, dusty, obscuring, and rarely entertained. Here, he pushes his hair behind an ear, angles his head, considering. Not so bad.
And due for a raise, perhaps, if Louis is going to spend more time stateside.
Louis looks him over, smiling a little at the small gesture of Lestat pushing his hair back. Remembering too the life they had together.
In the present, admiring the graceful drape of the sleeves, the fall of fabric around Lestat's still-narrow hips. Louis likes it very much. He is still handsome, even thinner, even marked by years of neglect.
"It's only a beginning," Louis offers. "I was thinking of what you wore before."
Maybe no longer relevant. Or maybe only a touchstone from which Lestat will build something else from when (if?) he continues updating his wardrobe.
Yes, he can see it. Colours, shape, if all quite pared down compared to the ceremony of three piece suits, ties, hats, jewelry. One hundred years ago, Lestat wouldn't imagine stepping out onto the street in this current get up alone. And then things had gotten more lax over the years, even during the time they were together, and now, another shift in sensibility. Decades.
One last brush down over his hips to smooth out the fabric, and he dismisses the mirror, content. Circling around to go and address his boots, cleaned and dry, tracing his fingertips over the leather and then pausing as Louis asks that.
Well. Yes.
Lestat looks back at him over his shoulder. "I wouldn't want to eat you out of house and home," he says. There must be only so many bags of blood on hand for them.
Dismissive. It is not a problem. Louis has endless reserves. It has been made very certain, established in the beginning and never one had the supply lapsed.
Louis has lifted his coat from where he had laid it the night before. Tests the fabric to find it still sodden and sighs. Seeks an alternative in his suitcase.
"We can go hunting," Louis offers, voice steadier than he feels. "For whatever you are in the mood for."
Rats, if Lestat wishes. Louis certainly has no standing to object.
And he is trying. Live honestly, he had said. Whatever form that takes.
The proposition has him go still, thoughtful, looking Louis over as if there is more he can read in his posture and stance. A proposition that has, in the past, been nothing but fraught, and now they are here, in the year 2022, with guiltless human blood available at their fingertips.
The answer is that yes, Lestat would like to hunt. Would Louis?
It's possible there are better ways to find out whether or not Louis intends to hunt properly than by dragging Lestat along with him. By risking ripping open old scars less than twenty-four hours after they reunited.
Nights ahead, where I might live honestly, Louis had said.
"I'm not sure," is honest. Louis offers, "We can walk in the park. See what kind of mood catches us."
Even if Louis couldn't make himself ready now, couldn't risk beginning something as destructive as his hunts had once been, he would like to see Lestat return to hunting. He would like to know that Lestat will be able to feed himself.
Some past iteration of himself is groaning, fussing, scoffing at the hesitation he feels, the hesitation he indulges in. Louis inviting him out to hunt would have made his decade, eighty years back.
Thrills him now, too, but it all feels so momentous. Louis being here at all, Louis giving him care and forgiveness. What if they can't withstand it? What if something breaks?
But Lestat doesn't spend too long wringing his hands about it. It all feels a little beyond his control, anyway. Louis will stay as long as Louis wishes to stay. Lestat will hunt again, because he is a hunter and he would no sooner eat a rat in Louis' presence as he would roll around in the mud to undo all of last night's hard work. They will see what kind of mood catches them.
It is agreed. Lestat puts his boots back on, declines needing a coat (it is almost never that cold), and they leave the hotel. If the man working the desk or the man working the door notices Lestat's little Cinderella transformation, they know better than to emote it.
Outside, the sky is clear. The streets aren't flooded. There is a certain quality to the noise of the city that feels a little restless and nervous, to Lestat's ear, but there is the sound of traffic, of bars with the windows open, of music and laughter, all over the top of generators, sirens, patches of silence. Like the whole town is hungover, but shaking it off. The scent of storm clings to the brick.
They walk to Jackson Square. Lestat thinks he could find it blindfolded.
Or no, not nostalgia. Relief. A pain Louis hadn't fully understood or registered quieted.
Homesickness ebbed away. Gone now as they walk side by side the way they had before, and like then Louis is thinking of Lestat. Aware of how he moves, imagining what he might be thinking. And like then, Louis doesn't let himself reach for him. They only walk close, elbows brushing, as they fall into step together once more.
The park is windswept, scattered with debris, but whole. And there are no other visitors that Louis can hear, though the sound of the city has followed them, a melodious backdrop as they walk along the same winding paths they'd once taken together almost nightly.
"I been missing this place," Louis confides. Complicated sentiment, maybe something Louis can try to untangle for Lestat someday. (Walking through parks alone in Paris, dreaming of Lestat, choosing parks with some similarity to stem the homesickness.)
"You wanna walk, or you wanna sit?"
As if they aren't due a conversation. One pressing matter at a time.
He has not deprived himself of New Orleans completely. Yes, he has not gone out much lately, and somewhere in the past several weeks (or months?) he has not left his home at all, but such things happen, neglectful periods of time where he doesn't wish to go beyond his own walls. It's bound to occur.
But between these times, he has gone to Jackson Square. He has walked along the Mississippi. He has strolled down the Rue Royale. He has watched the buskers, and given them hundred dollar bills in their instrument cases. He has moved through the city like a ghost, a living piece of urban folklore. He has, just as often, imagined Louis beside him.
"Sit," he chooses, because they have done a little walking. It would be nice to indulge in the old rituals. "Our bench is this way."
"Our bench," Louis echoes, a murmur more for himself than Lestat.
Their bench, just as they left it. Their bench where they would spend long hours talking, nights together and then with Claudia. Louis runs fingers over the wood, down the wrought iron arms, before sitting. Hooks up an ankle, just as he'd done long decades ago.
They could talk about anything. Speak more on the Golden Girls, or the last movie Lestat remembers seeing. But those are things that might need to be saved, set aside, if Lestat's curiosity is such that he cares to ask his questions again.
"You okay?" Louis asks instead.
They don't need to talk about it. It's what the question means.
Here is the bench, there is the cathedral. A different soundscape, now. No quaint horse and buggies baiting tourists into generous tips. Someone is playing a metal-stringed guitar—although, Lestat must reminds himself, all guitars are metal-stringed now—and there are less people out roaming in the wake of the hurricane.
But it is their park, their bench, their cathedral. Lestat sits, as he has done many times, crossing a leg over, arms folding around himself.
"Me?" he asks, as if the question is odd. "Yes, Louis. Nothing has happened to me."
A lot of nothing. Louis, though—
"What about you? Did you come here become you're not okay?" An earnest question.
Briefly disorienting; Louis had never thought he'd be here again, and now he is, and for a moment they have slipped out of time and into the past.
And then Lestat speaks and Lestat arranges himself just so and Louis wants to press him, just a little. Nothing happened. Something happened. Long years alone, dwindling down into disrepair alone in a shack, that is something.
But Lestat looks so earnest. Louis sighs, soft.
"I wasn't okay for a long time."
He was alive, yes. But being eaten by his own grief. Living with the restless understanding that something was amiss, and not able to see it until Daniel lifted the blindfold from his eyes.
"But I'm okay now," Louis tells him. "I came because I'm going to be okay, and this helps."
Imagine talking about things. The freedom of that.
It has weighed on them, throughout these spare several hours they've shared together, the things still unsaid. A deliberate decision, but perhaps a habit. Lestat still remembers what it felt like, physically, to speak of her, like a great pressure in his chest that had only just begun to loosen. He has spoken her name to no one. He imagines—
Well, he doesn't wish to imagine, he wishes to be told, but perhaps again, that Louis has the same problem, had it, despite having had a companion all this time. Lestat believes him when he says he is okay now, or will be.
So, an explicit invitation. He unfolds an arm to brush his knuckles down Louis' shoulder as he says, "Tell me."
Remember all the ways they had touched each other in the thirty year span of their marriage. Covert, careful.
The world has changed around them. Louis could lean across the bench and kiss Lestat if he wanted. Maybe someone would jeer. It would be a lesser thing than it was once.
Louis had leaned in and kissed Armand in Paris, ignored the sour shout the act had provoked. He and Armand had touched each other in public since. Louis had touched men in public since.
Lestat draws his knuckles down Louis' shoulder and Louis feels it again, the weight of all their years apart. All that they'd missed.
Tell me invites so much that Louis is briefly overwhelmed thinking of all that Lestat doesn't know. And so he says nothing right away, instead settling himself on the bench, crossing his legs, stretching an arm across the back of the bench.
"I asked him if he saved me, and he said yes," Louis relates. This first thing. The bedrock upon which almost eighty years of companionship had been built. "We left together, after speaking to you."
Things Lestat must have known, must have understood.
"I didn't know he'd lied to me. I didn't know what he'd done before. I didn't know it was his script and his direction."
There are other transgressions. Louis doesn't care to speak them aloud just now.
Yes, some of this Lestat must have known. But some of it he does not. After all, did Louis not hear him call for banishment? See Armand in his place of privilege, watching? He feels something coil sharp in his chest as he listens.
An odd and sudden gravity, to evoke the last time they'd seen each other, those decades ago. Its evocation prickles cool across Lestat's skin, but he refuses himself the urge to look down or away. Watching Louis all the while. Uncurling a finger, letting his knuckle touch the weave of his coat at his shoulder.
"What did you know," he must ask, "when you were on the stage?"
What did Louis know? What did he know on that stage?
Lestat touches him, and Louis realizes, detached, that he does not want to be touched. He doesn't want to be touched and he doesn't want Lestat to stop.
Louis looks away, very still even as he lifts eyes to the sky above them.
What did he know?
Daniel had made guide rails, questions like touchstones, like scaffolding. Microphone, notepad. No more diaries then, not for recounting this.
Here, now, Lestat asks and Louis delves back into the tangle of recollection.
Louis thinks first of—
Hands lifting him out of his chair. Claudia, screaming her name. Losing his grip on her hands. Screaming and screaming and screaming—
No. Before that.
Madeleine, straight-backed and unrepentant, lifting a finger as the crowd jeered.
No. After that.
Claudia. He thinks of Claudia, Claudia, Claudia. The wilderness that was their daughter. Claudia, in her yellow dress. Claudia, forced into the chair beside him. She'd leaned into him, and he'd leaned back, and they were together.
No.
It is like touching a hot stove. Like holding a forearm in the sunlight.
(Maybe it will never hurt less.)
"I could see him from where I was sitting," Louis says quietly. "I remembered seeing him, behind Sam with his scythe. Holding all those mortals words in their throat."
A memory. All these years, it felt like a memory. A cornerstone upon which almost eighty years had been built upon.
"He told me he saved me," Louis repeats. "I asked, and he told me how."
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Complicated, how he feels about it. How much he likes it. How the sound of it carries a muted pain along with it. New Orleans making its mark on Lestat, and Louis miles and miles away, losing his own accent for long decades. A sorrowful kind of symmetry.
"I know you have money," Louis tells him, setting aside his empty cup. Admits, quiet: "Lived off it for a couple months when we first got to Paris."
And he'd felt deep guilt about it, how they'd taken from him after what they'd done. What Louis had done. Claudia's anger simmering, remorseless, and Louis haunted, grief-stricken and guilty, using Lestat's money for that apartment, for clothes, for furnishings—
It had felt wrong.
But this, it's not only about the money they'd taken, not about repayment. Louis still likes to pick out things for Lestat. A phone is only the most acceptable avenue, utilitarian rather than the opulent whirl of goods they'd swept up when Lestat had first arrived in New Orleans.
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The handful of months spent in Paris had consisted of at least one appointment with Roget. The theatre destroyed meant a shuffle around in various portfolios. Reports of what had been extracted, including his final letter. Money, then, shifted into a kind of interest-accruing hibernation. The practical things, done at his behest.
But Lestat does not recall feeling resentment or anger or really much of anything at the time and now, certainly not. He starts to say something like what he used to say, to express that all his wealth is Louis' wealth, and stops. If this is true, what does that say for the reverse?
Maybe what Lestat is saying: I can look after myself.
Suspects he will have to, at some point, but for now—
"Then, if it would please you."
His tone says: if it would please Louis, it would please him too.
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Maybe will have to say later, once a phone is procured, that it would please him also if Lestat were to use it.
But not now.
The far door opens once more. Rachida bears in a crisp brown paper bag, sets it by the window. A brief exchange between her and Louis, logistics only. A few lingering pieces of business, things that could not accommodate being upended just because Louis' life had been entirely upended.
And then she is gone. And it is the two of them, alone in a room again.
"I made guesses," Louis says. "What you might like to wear."
And may well be far off base. They have been apart for a long time. Lestat had been wearing expensive things, in spite of the obvious neglect. Louis has chosen some similar items. Draping shirts, gleaming black buttons for fastening. Soft, clinging undershirts. Loose trousers, waists nipped in. And Lestat's own boots returned, polished, repaired.
A humble offering. A start.
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Like Louis has let in a stray cat, which happens to be a lion. He finishes his cup while they talk, a languid and luxurious drinking down of thick blood, twisting to set it down once she leaves the room.
"Oh?" at this news. Tempting enough to draw Lestat out of bed, finally, one last glance before pushing himself across the mattress to go attend to the bag. Not because he is so excited for new clothes, but keen to see what Louis would choose for him.
Hums over these items, drawing them out one by one. Garments made for men but with the textures and softness that he would still associate with women's clothes, trousers that hang like skirts and shirts that drape like blouses. Pleasing, this confusion, or mingling, whatever it is. These resemble, too, the things he'd been wearing last night, even if he barely recalls obtaining them, choosing them.
"I do," he says, over a shoulder. "I like them."
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Louis had guided him into the present day, but Lestat had found his footing eventually.
(A fond memory of the ways their wardrobes had complimented. Subtle matching between colors, small mirrors in their chosen accessories. Louis had enjoyed those things, minor ways to link them, if easy to overlook.)
"This is just for starters," Louis reminds, the curling pleasure in his chest rising as he watches Lestat handling his choices kept in careful check. "You can send Rachida out if you want. If there's more you think you need."
While he's here. While they're together. A offer guided by the anxious urge to get Lestat set up, well-stocked and safe, guiding the offer.
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"These will do, Louis," Lestat says instead, looking over at him. Clutching the articles in his hands tighter, relaxing, before he says, with a tip of his head, "Should I change in the other room?"
A little bit of a real question, but delivered with some coy and proper affectation.
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Maybe.
"You change where you want," Louis tells him, an easy shrug of acceptance as he leaves Lestat in custody of the bag and considers his own suitcase. "I won't mind."
A choice laid out for Lestat as Louis strips to the waist. His suitcase is neatly opened on its stand, waiting for Louis to make some selections of his own.
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Lestat stays where he is.
But turns his back, and undresses without ceremony. Then, briefs first, followed by a pair of trousers of a dark grey with a subtle pinstripe, fabric draping save for where it buttons around his waist. A clinging wide-necked undershirt is layered beneath a loose button down of a deep rusty red. Some hesitation follows buttoning it closed halfway up his chest and tucking the loose tails into his waistband. And then undoing another button.
Familiar shades, somewhat familiar silhouettes, flattering his proportions in the way he'd been specific about back when, and still now. He skims his fingers over his knuckles. His little collection of rings, likely still hidden away in his home. Unless Felix stole them. In which case, he will remove Felix's spine.
"Voilà," he says, twirling back around. If he catches sight of a butt cheek by accident, it will be a good start to the evening, but he has been polite. "What should I do with the sleeves?" Rolled, unrolled and buttoned? He would like input.
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It is a marked deviation. Louis is experimenting, not yet sure he is interested but willing to give himself the day.
"Come here," Louis beckons, reaching out with one hand while the other tugs clinging knit fabric into place over his chest and stomach.
An excuse to take Lestat by the wrist, run his thumb over the delicate tracery of veins there at the inside of his arm before fastening the button.
"Feel okay?"
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Home, in little golden glimpses. How near it seems, how far away. He wanders a glance back up at this question.
"Yes," he says, unsure as to what metric they're measuring by, but all of them are at the very least okay. The clothes, probably. A glance aside locates a mirror on the wall, and he turns to it while leaving his other wrist in Louis' care. "Your valet has good taste."
He has not had much cause to preen in front of a mirror, lately. The only one in his cottage is in the door of its wardrobe, which is spotted, dusty, obscuring, and rarely entertained. Here, he pushes his hair behind an ear, angles his head, considering. Not so bad.
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And due for a raise, perhaps, if Louis is going to spend more time stateside.
Louis looks him over, smiling a little at the small gesture of Lestat pushing his hair back. Remembering too the life they had together.
In the present, admiring the graceful drape of the sleeves, the fall of fabric around Lestat's still-narrow hips. Louis likes it very much. He is still handsome, even thinner, even marked by years of neglect.
"It's only a beginning," Louis offers. "I was thinking of what you wore before."
Maybe no longer relevant. Or maybe only a touchstone from which Lestat will build something else from when (if?) he continues updating his wardrobe.
"Are you still hungry?"
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One last brush down over his hips to smooth out the fabric, and he dismisses the mirror, content. Circling around to go and address his boots, cleaned and dry, tracing his fingertips over the leather and then pausing as Louis asks that.
Well. Yes.
Lestat looks back at him over his shoulder. "I wouldn't want to eat you out of house and home," he says. There must be only so many bags of blood on hand for them.
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Dismissive. It is not a problem. Louis has endless reserves. It has been made very certain, established in the beginning and never one had the supply lapsed.
Louis has lifted his coat from where he had laid it the night before. Tests the fabric to find it still sodden and sighs. Seeks an alternative in his suitcase.
"We can go hunting," Louis offers, voice steadier than he feels. "For whatever you are in the mood for."
Rats, if Lestat wishes. Louis certainly has no standing to object.
And he is trying. Live honestly, he had said. Whatever form that takes.
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The answer is that yes, Lestat would like to hunt. Would Louis?
"It would not spoil your visit?"
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It's possible there are better ways to find out whether or not Louis intends to hunt properly than by dragging Lestat along with him. By risking ripping open old scars less than twenty-four hours after they reunited.
Nights ahead, where I might live honestly, Louis had said.
"I'm not sure," is honest. Louis offers, "We can walk in the park. See what kind of mood catches us."
Even if Louis couldn't make himself ready now, couldn't risk beginning something as destructive as his hunts had once been, he would like to see Lestat return to hunting. He would like to know that Lestat will be able to feed himself.
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Thrills him now, too, but it all feels so momentous. Louis being here at all, Louis giving him care and forgiveness. What if they can't withstand it? What if something breaks?
But Lestat doesn't spend too long wringing his hands about it. It all feels a little beyond his control, anyway. Louis will stay as long as Louis wishes to stay. Lestat will hunt again, because he is a hunter and he would no sooner eat a rat in Louis' presence as he would roll around in the mud to undo all of last night's hard work. They will see what kind of mood catches them.
It is agreed. Lestat puts his boots back on, declines needing a coat (it is almost never that cold), and they leave the hotel. If the man working the desk or the man working the door notices Lestat's little Cinderella transformation, they know better than to emote it.
Outside, the sky is clear. The streets aren't flooded. There is a certain quality to the noise of the city that feels a little restless and nervous, to Lestat's ear, but there is the sound of traffic, of bars with the windows open, of music and laughter, all over the top of generators, sirens, patches of silence. Like the whole town is hungover, but shaking it off. The scent of storm clings to the brick.
They walk to Jackson Square. Lestat thinks he could find it blindfolded.
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Or no, not nostalgia. Relief. A pain Louis hadn't fully understood or registered quieted.
Homesickness ebbed away. Gone now as they walk side by side the way they had before, and like then Louis is thinking of Lestat. Aware of how he moves, imagining what he might be thinking. And like then, Louis doesn't let himself reach for him. They only walk close, elbows brushing, as they fall into step together once more.
The park is windswept, scattered with debris, but whole. And there are no other visitors that Louis can hear, though the sound of the city has followed them, a melodious backdrop as they walk along the same winding paths they'd once taken together almost nightly.
"I been missing this place," Louis confides. Complicated sentiment, maybe something Louis can try to untangle for Lestat someday. (Walking through parks alone in Paris, dreaming of Lestat, choosing parks with some similarity to stem the homesickness.)
"You wanna walk, or you wanna sit?"
As if they aren't due a conversation. One pressing matter at a time.
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He has not deprived himself of New Orleans completely. Yes, he has not gone out much lately, and somewhere in the past several weeks (or months?) he has not left his home at all, but such things happen, neglectful periods of time where he doesn't wish to go beyond his own walls. It's bound to occur.
But between these times, he has gone to Jackson Square. He has walked along the Mississippi. He has strolled down the Rue Royale. He has watched the buskers, and given them hundred dollar bills in their instrument cases. He has moved through the city like a ghost, a living piece of urban folklore. He has, just as often, imagined Louis beside him.
"Sit," he chooses, because they have done a little walking. It would be nice to indulge in the old rituals. "Our bench is this way."
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Their bench, just as they left it. Their bench where they would spend long hours talking, nights together and then with Claudia. Louis runs fingers over the wood, down the wrought iron arms, before sitting. Hooks up an ankle, just as he'd done long decades ago.
They could talk about anything. Speak more on the Golden Girls, or the last movie Lestat remembers seeing. But those are things that might need to be saved, set aside, if Lestat's curiosity is such that he cares to ask his questions again.
"You okay?" Louis asks instead.
They don't need to talk about it. It's what the question means.
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But it is their park, their bench, their cathedral. Lestat sits, as he has done many times, crossing a leg over, arms folding around himself.
"Me?" he asks, as if the question is odd. "Yes, Louis. Nothing has happened to me."
A lot of nothing. Louis, though—
"What about you? Did you come here become you're not okay?" An earnest question.
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And then Lestat speaks and Lestat arranges himself just so and Louis wants to press him, just a little. Nothing happened. Something happened. Long years alone, dwindling down into disrepair alone in a shack, that is something.
But Lestat looks so earnest. Louis sighs, soft.
"I wasn't okay for a long time."
He was alive, yes. But being eaten by his own grief. Living with the restless understanding that something was amiss, and not able to see it until Daniel lifted the blindfold from his eyes.
"But I'm okay now," Louis tells him. "I came because I'm going to be okay, and this helps."
Being home. Being with Lestat.
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It has weighed on them, throughout these spare several hours they've shared together, the things still unsaid. A deliberate decision, but perhaps a habit. Lestat still remembers what it felt like, physically, to speak of her, like a great pressure in his chest that had only just begun to loosen. He has spoken her name to no one. He imagines—
Well, he doesn't wish to imagine, he wishes to be told, but perhaps again, that Louis has the same problem, had it, despite having had a companion all this time. Lestat believes him when he says he is okay now, or will be.
So, an explicit invitation. He unfolds an arm to brush his knuckles down Louis' shoulder as he says, "Tell me."
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The world has changed around them. Louis could lean across the bench and kiss Lestat if he wanted. Maybe someone would jeer. It would be a lesser thing than it was once.
Louis had leaned in and kissed Armand in Paris, ignored the sour shout the act had provoked. He and Armand had touched each other in public since. Louis had touched men in public since.
Lestat draws his knuckles down Louis' shoulder and Louis feels it again, the weight of all their years apart. All that they'd missed.
Tell me invites so much that Louis is briefly overwhelmed thinking of all that Lestat doesn't know. And so he says nothing right away, instead settling himself on the bench, crossing his legs, stretching an arm across the back of the bench.
"I asked him if he saved me, and he said yes," Louis relates. This first thing. The bedrock upon which almost eighty years of companionship had been built. "We left together, after speaking to you."
Things Lestat must have known, must have understood.
"I didn't know he'd lied to me. I didn't know what he'd done before. I didn't know it was his script and his direction."
There are other transgressions. Louis doesn't care to speak them aloud just now.
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Yes, some of this Lestat must have known. But some of it he does not. After all, did Louis not hear him call for banishment? See Armand in his place of privilege, watching? He feels something coil sharp in his chest as he listens.
An odd and sudden gravity, to evoke the last time they'd seen each other, those decades ago. Its evocation prickles cool across Lestat's skin, but he refuses himself the urge to look down or away. Watching Louis all the while. Uncurling a finger, letting his knuckle touch the weave of his coat at his shoulder.
"What did you know," he must ask, "when you were on the stage?"
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Lestat touches him, and Louis realizes, detached, that he does not want to be touched. He doesn't want to be touched and he doesn't want Lestat to stop.
Louis looks away, very still even as he lifts eyes to the sky above them.
What did he know?
Daniel had made guide rails, questions like touchstones, like scaffolding. Microphone, notepad. No more diaries then, not for recounting this.
Here, now, Lestat asks and Louis delves back into the tangle of recollection.
Louis thinks first of—
Hands lifting him out of his chair. Claudia, screaming her name. Losing his grip on her hands. Screaming and screaming and screaming—
No. Before that.
Madeleine, straight-backed and unrepentant, lifting a finger as the crowd jeered.
No. After that.
Claudia. He thinks of Claudia, Claudia, Claudia. The wilderness that was their daughter. Claudia, in her yellow dress. Claudia, forced into the chair beside him. She'd leaned into him, and he'd leaned back, and they were together.
No.
It is like touching a hot stove. Like holding a forearm in the sunlight.
(Maybe it will never hurt less.)
"I could see him from where I was sitting," Louis says quietly. "I remembered seeing him, behind Sam with his scythe. Holding all those mortals words in their throat."
A memory. All these years, it felt like a memory. A cornerstone upon which almost eighty years had been built upon.
"He told me he saved me," Louis repeats. "I asked, and he told me how."
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